BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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DESCRIPTION (Internal System's) 2)3)

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This is the traditional way of description.

R. ROSEN states: "Typically such a description begins with a characterization of what the system is like at an instant of time; such a characterization is said to define a state of the system. The totality of all the possible states of the system, meaning the totality of different aspects the system can assume for us at an instant of time, forms a set called the state space of the system" (1972, p.50).(with the corresponding state variables).

This is satisfactory for linear systems, but quite insufficient for nonlinear ones. In these cases, at least two essential characteristics of the system escape to this kind of internal description:

- the mechanism of self-catalytic hyper-cycles, which describes how some states are regenerated from other states;

- The organizational closure, closely related to the former mechanism, which determines which states are admitted and which ones are excluded, in order to maintain the system's identity.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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